


Casualty Calculator

by missmollyetc



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-27
Updated: 2009-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-05 08:31:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missmollyetc/pseuds/missmollyetc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A calculator is only as good as the information given to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Casualty Calculator

  
  
  
**Entry tags:** |   
[fanfic100](http://missmollyetc.livejournal.com/tag/fanfic100), [numb3rs](http://missmollyetc.livejournal.com/tag/numb3rs)  
  
---|---  
  
_ **NUMB3RS FIC: Casualty Calculator** _

Title: Casualty Calculator

Character: Charlie Eppes, Numb3rs

Rating: G

Summary: A calculator is only as good as the information given to it.

Prompt: 004: Insides

Disclaimer: I have nothing (apparently, not even my sanity). Numb3rs is the product of CBS and the Scott Brothers, and I make nothing from this while they rake in the millions. Which is how I like it. In other words? I. Made. It. Up.

 

 

 

Charlie throws open the door of Don's bedroom without knocking and leans a shoulder against the threshold. Don looks up from his seat on the bed, half-out of his button-down. His hands work over the buttons, and Charlie notes that smooth, hairless skin covers the first two knuckles on each and that Don's right hand has a slightly crooked thumb. Coop had pointed those out in one of his stories. That's how Charlie learned that Don was good in a fight.

Don raises his eyebrows, but doesn't look surprised. The two weeks of Don's Epic Apartment Fumigation are almost up and already Charlie can feel them slipping into semi-familiar patterns. It's strange, like trying to use a phantom limb, and yet the whole situation is oddly comforting at the same time. He can almost see them both as they were, overlayed with who they each are now.

"What's up, buddy?" Don asks.

Charlie shrugs. "Just wondered if you were coming to Dad's…thing."

He circles one hand in the air, finger upraised. He's pretty sure Dad's thing was today anyway. Of course, he's only fifty percent sure Dad actually had a thing to go to.

Don grins and stands up, favoring his left knee a bit more than usual. He pulls his over-and undershirts out of his slacks and over his head. His stomach is still mainly flat, black hairs marking out the curves of his abs down to his waistband. Charlie averts his eyes, but sneaks a peek as Don swivels, tossing the shirts into the hamper.

Don's always had this quality about him: solid and unmovable, dependable and perfect in its dimensions--like the base of a pyramid. But Charlie knows that Don is human and has a body unremarkable--essentially--from other humans. A body, for all its central mystery, is still bounded by the restraints of physics, and through physics, of mathematics.

"I don't know, _Charlie_…what 'thing' do you mean?"

Charlie rolls his eyes and slouches on the threshold, tucking his hands under his arms.

"I don't know, _Don_…the one he was talking about at dinner last night?"

He's pretty sure that was dinner last night anyway, because Larry and he'd just got their hands on these _bizarre_ algorithms coming out of Stanford and he'd always figured Horsky and his team were smoking half their budget, but _come on_. There were breakthroughs and then there were offers to join the Flat Earth Society. The whole thing was worth reading if only for the comedic--

Don turns to the dresser and Charlie loses his train of thought because the light has caught on a purplish line traveling the width of Don's side and curling five inches parallel to his spine. The air seems thinner all of a sudden. Charlie swallows away a sudden ache in his throat.

It's a brave new world and Charlie's slowly coming to terms with that--that sort of thing. The kind of events that might lead to that sort of _scar_. He tries to focus on other matters, but he's no more or less human than his brother and the human body is the most perfect machine ever created, designed not to _defy_, but to work in _tandem_ with its bonds.

It's only the brain which continually strives for something more, calculating the imprecise data fed to it by the other organs which can only sense subjective to their own requirements. And, since the data isn't correct, then the outcome itself becomes hazardous. Don's brain will take him again and again into a bank, into a fight, and straight into the path of Charlie's immutable mathematics.

Don's back is still broad, the shoulders dense with muscle, but he broke his thumb on some guy's face in a bar in Phoenix and the skin of his knuckles was scraped off and then grew tough from brawling and his knee was never quite right for reasons he won't explain and now… Charlie's eyes are drawn downwards. The scar itself looks remarkably smooth, almost like a stroke from a painter's brush.

"Do you mean the book club or Mrs. Widderman's husband's garden show?"

"Why don't you just call it 'Mr. Widderman's garden show'?" Charlie asks absently.

How has he not noticed that Don never goes shirtless outside? Would Coop know about this, or is it Kim's story to tell? What equation has Don been solving without Charlie to check his figures?

Don chuckles. "You _have_ met Mrs. Widderman, haven't you?"

He pulls open the top drawer and the movement ripples down his back. Charlie watches the scar undulate and curls his fingers into fists, re-tucking them under his arms.

As Charlie watches, Don reaches inside the drawer and pulls out a fresh shirt. Again his back muscles rise and fall, the scar an obscene break in activity. A scar is dead flesh, and its movement is caused by the live cells surrounding it being forced to work over time to compensate. Does he feel that stretch? Does it hurt him?

"Well? Which was it, the club or the show?" Don asks, voice muffled as the shirt covers his head.

"I um…"

Charlie blinks rapidly and his sight becomes a series of snapshots. The curving fingers of Don's ribs, snap. The swell and drop of vertebrae, snap. The acute angles of his shoulder blades, snap. The purple valley of scar tissue, _snap._

The new shirt falls to Don's waist and the scar disappears. He turns. His hair is flattened to his forehead and he ruffles it back up with one hand.

"Charlie?"

Don grins and the skin around his eyes crinkles. He tilts his head and waves one broad palm through the air.

"You with me, buddy?" he asks.

Human skin is enormously resilient, capable of shrinking and expanding to fit the needs of the body it protects, nerve endings constantly streaming information to the central nervous system. For all that, it takes less than a pound of pressure to rupture the complex levels of hair, skin, and blood, and once breached…well, insides aren't meant to be outsides, are they?

Mathematics didn't fail Don and neither did physics. Don's _body_ acts entirely according to its mandate. Charlie stifles the urge to laugh, while his fingers itch for chalk.

He'd always thought his brother was brain damaged, and now he's finally got proof. Math's all about what you can prove and a proof is correct time and time again. He just has to get used to the new data.

"Charlie."

Don takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly through his nostrils. Charlie shrugs as best he can and stands away from the threshold of the door. He nods his head.

"Yeah, I'm with you," he says.

 

End.


End file.
